Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Wobbling towards 'awesomeness'

The digesting duck captures my point of view to game AI so well that it is hard to decide where to start describing it.

I think there are a lot of parallels on how the automatons were build once upon the time and how game AI is being build in 21st century. It is a shame to think how much of the original ideas of those illusionists we have lost. I think we could learn a lot from the observations of the people from that time.

Too much of the game building is though to be magic. Most of the designers (especially ones that have no programming background) I know have a lot of trouble understanding how game mechanics work.

And the most common reason seems to be that they want to believe. They want to believe that there is something magical happening in the code that makes things tick. Just like the people who saw mechanical pooping duck few hundreds years ago.

I think better analogy is that we are building mechanical toys. Instead of popping the hood, we open the game editor or turn on debug views. These visualisations of the inner workings of the game magic should give the designer better understanding how things work. I sometimes feel like the game studios should hire UX people to make the game data more understandable for all the people whore are working on it.

My intention is to make this blog about building the most awesome 'mechanical toys' and share snippets of interesting code.

The title of this post is a 'homage' to my friend's Chris' blog. He does not post often, but when ever he does it is pure awesomeness.